Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities

Abstract

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. However, the next step—to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics—has seldom been taken. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 European cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects. The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces.

The Size of Plazas in Mesoamerican Cities and Towns: A Quantitative Analysis

“…Estimate 2-which we consider more realistic and accuratebuilds from the observation that human settlements generally increase in density as their populations grow. This pattern has been observed in a number of demographic analyses of both modern and premodern settlement systems, where settlement area exhibits a regular sublinear scaling relationship with respect to population (Cesaretti et al 2016;Cook and Heizer 1968;Ortman et al 2014;. The elasticity of the population-area relationship in these studies is similar to that found in contemporary urban systems, and it matches the value predicted by current models (Bettencourt 2013 …”

Irrigated areas grow faster than the population

“…, , Cesaretti et al. ), suggesting that scaling relationships might be impermeable to historical contingencies. Checking this out in the case of irrigated areas requires a systematic collection of diachronic data on the changes in size undergone by ancient irrigated areas and related settlement clusters.…”

“…, Cesaretti et al. ). To my knowledge, and despite its potential to unfold universal patterns between agrarian areas and population, this approach has not been integrated in the study of the dynamics of food‐producing systems as yet.…”

“…For a given change in population, therefore, the extent of the irrigated area changes by the same value of b regardless of the initial population size. Scaling has been applied to understand the growth rate of animals and their metabolic rates (White et al 2007) or of cities and attributes such as wealth creation capacity, pace of innovation, CO 2 emissions, or population density (White et al 2007, Bettencourt 2013, Fragkias et al 2013, Ortman et al 2014, Cesaretti et al 2016. To my knowledge, and despite its potential to unfold universal patterns between agrarian areas and population, this approach has not been integrated in the study of the dynamics of food-producing systems as yet.…”

Growth and health status of children and adolescents in medieval Central Europe

“…Growing population size in an area restricted by city walls caused spatial limitations, and increased density. Generally, there were spatial, political, economic, and social differences between the city and the countryside, which reflected in different stresses in the environment experienced by rural and urban families (Mitchell 2007;Cesaretti et al 2016). It appears from archaeological and historical data on medieval Poland, that the population of the stronghold was dense and lived in a network of narrow streets lined with tightly packed wooden buildings (houses, shops, and workshops).…”